The eye of a sperm whale. Picture credit: Ecohotel - CC0 Public Domain
As a child, Philip Hoare was terrified of the ocean. He recalls his mother reading him children’s encyclopaedias and being anxious even to touch the pages depicting deep-sea fish, thinking he’d be “dragged down into the abyss”.
Now he swims every morning, all year round. He’s developed a lifelong, deeply romantic relationship with the sea, and especially whales. He’s seen them many times, but a few years ago he had a life-changing encounter.
At Cape Cod, New England, Philip found himself inches away from a sperm whale’s melon-sized eye. “It was reading me,” he says. “I felt its echolocation on my body, like an MRI scan. Then it turned its massive head and stared into my eyes. Seconds felt like hours before it disappeared into the darkness.” He describes it as the most disconcerting moment of his life.
As an author and journalist, one of Philip’s lifelong pleas is for a greater consideration of how sentient our ocean’s giants are.
Jonas Henmo